(i) Technical Field
The present invention relates to a spool control device and a non-transitory computer readable medium.
(ii) Related Art
In digital print systems, print data which is supplied from a host device and which is described in a page description language is interpreted (this process is also called raster image processing (RIP)), and is thereby converted to image data to be handled by a printer, such as a raster image, and the image data is supplied to the printer so as to be printed. Also, a configuration is well known in which a spool device, including a hard disk or the like serving as a storage medium, is provided between a RIP side and a printer side, so as to absorb a difference in processing speed between both sides and to enable the printer to stably operate.
In high-speed digital print systems available in recent years, plural RIP sections that perform RIP are provided and are caused to operate in parallel, so as to increase RIP speed. For example, processing operations are assigned to the individual RIP sections on the basis of processing units, such as pages or color planes in a page including yellow (Y), magenta (M), cyan (C), and black (K).
In some cases, inconvenience of delay in reading out image data from a spool device arises along with an increasing speed of printers. In order to address such delay, according to the related art, pieces of image data are written from a RIP side onto a spool device in an output order in which the pieces of image data are to be output to a printer, so that the pieces of image data are written in a physically continuous region of a hard disk in the spool device in the output order. Accordingly, in the case of reading out the pieces of image data from the hard disk to output them to the printer, the pieces of image data are read out in the order in which the pieces of image data have been stored in the physically continuous region of the hard disk. This suppresses the occurrence of inefficient head seek, and a theoretical readout speed is maximized.